Spreadsheet as a Generic Purpose Mashup Development Environment

Mashup development is done using purposely created tools. Because each tool offers a different paradigm and syntax for wiring mashup components, users need to learn different tools for different tasks. We believe that there is a need for a generic purpose mashup environment catering for a wider range of mashup applications. In this paper we introduce MashSheet - a spreadsheet-based, generic purpose mashup tool. Using MashSheet, mashups can be built using spreadsheet paradigms that many users are already familiar with. We use a generic data model (XML-based) to represent mashup components and data produced by them, which enables the reuse of intermediate mashup results. We support three classes of mashup operations: data, process and visualization.